Lord of the Rings Online MMO News, Guides, and Features at Ten Ton Hammer

Ten Ton Hammer: You’re definitely conjuring up visions of Helm’s Deep and leading your troops into battle. You also have been alluding to something “big” coming later in the year. Will we see a level cap raise later this year?

Steefel: That is absolutely our intention. We can’t release details or anything like that, but we know that it’s an important step in the advancement path of players, so that’s definitely being slated for later this year.

Ten Ton Hammer: What are you including in the level cap increase? Are there any mistakes you’ve made in the past with level cap raises that you want to avoid this time around?

Steefel: It’s a very complicated thing. Adding advancement levels is very complex in how it affects all the various existing classes: how they’re impacted, how various groupsets work, how individual advancement abilities are affected. On top of that, we added a fair amount of complexity when we added legendary items to the game.

It’s been a good learning experience and we’ve made some adjustments since our last cap raise. We make all kinds of mistakes, but I think it’s all a matter of degree. It’s a process, and we hope that players think we’re paying attention to how a level cap increase and legendary item adjustments impact the players. And that we’re responding to the mistakes we make and the feedback we get. It’s a process and as much as we try to use our experience, test on our servers, test on the public test servers, it’s really not until it gets out to the community that we find out the real things we need to make changes to.

Ten Ton Hammer: You’ve made some user interface changes to help newer players get attuned to LOTRO. Could you comment on that?

Steefel: The changes that we made with Book 7 are actually even more wider reaching than that. What you’re referring to is the quest guide, which basically tells you where to go next and lets you know where your next objective is. A lot of people have been really excited about that, and a lot of people were asking for that sort of functionality.

For those folks that like to explore things organically and in a more haphazard way, you can turn it off. With everything like that, we want to make sure players have the choice to play the game in the way they’d like to enjoy.

That is actually just one tool in the totality of the new player experience that we worked on prior to the Book 7 launch that is designed to help players learn. We’re leveraging some of the technology that we’ve built since launch and adjusting the experience based on player feedback and how we know that players are coming into these games. And – in general – just polishing up our game and going back to the early part of the game and making sure that players who are starting out now are having an even better experience than the players that originally purchased LOTRO. Even those players that are making a new alt, we want to make sure they see a difference in how the new areas play.

We wanted to make sure that each adventure leads to the next in a more seamless, connected fashion rather than feeling like your wandering around in the first 5-10 levels of the game. We’ve gotten a lot of good feedback about this, and we’re not done. We actually spend a lot of time going backwards in our game, making sure that the entire game continues to improve and gets better and better.

This obviously gets more difficult as the game continues to grow, but it’s part of the responsibility we have and part of the fun as new types of players come to the game and we try to address their concerns and desires.

For example, one of the Books that was released pretty quickly after launch had some major changes for Angmar and some of the other parts of the game. We continue to look at old content while still pushing ahead and building things like Skirmishes for the more experienced players looking for new challenges.

Ten Ton Hammer: In addition to the MyLOTRO site that you’ve discussed, might we see a rewards program to go along with that? Can you give us an update on MyLOTRO as well?

Steefel: What players are currently seeing with MyLOTRO is really an early start on something that’s going to be a major part of what we want to do in terms of building a community and providing people with a out-of-game environment. Essentially, to us, it’s an extension of the game.

It will continue to grow and develop over time, and its intended to give players, the community, and people that are just visiting a place to share their experiences, explore their characters, explore their stories and really effortlessly allow them to talk about their experiences in the game.

It’s really exciting to see the online, social environment, sort of Web networking blended with what we’ve been doing for over a decade now, which is blending these immersive 3D social environments. They’re really meant to go together.

It also gives us an opportunity to surface a lot of interesting things about what we’re doing with the game. Some of the things you’re talking about in terms of rewards programs and loyalty programs are things that we’re discussing all the time, and we’re looking at MyLOTRO and asking how we can use it to surface types of…achievements (for lack of a better word) that players are achieving in the social web space and also in the game. These are all things that we’re talking about working on an it’s an active part of what we hope MyLOTRO is going to become.

Right now it’s really in beta, but it’s a pretty cool beta from what we have so far, and I think you’ll start to see it grow and evolve at a much faster pace.